1. Field of the Invention
The disclosures herein generally relate to an image forming apparatus, an image forming system and a display control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, an information providing service for business purposes utilizing digital displays has become popular, owing to the recent price reduction of large-sized display devices, such as liquid crystal displays, and the recent improvement of network infrastructures, which deliver contents to a display device. The information providing service for a business purpose is, for example, a service to set up a display device at a place where a wait time occurs, such as at a front desk, an elevator, in a rest stop, or the like, and to deliver an advertisement or the like to the display device, to display the content during a spare time.
However, the above-described information providing service originally aims at providing information to unspecified users, but does not provide detailed content corresponding to the needs or the preference of each individual. Moreover, a wait time varies for each individual. In a case where a user has to leave before a delivered content (e.g. a video) finishes, the user cannot watch the content to the end. Accordingly, the information providing service in the related art has a problem whereas a content provider cannot obtain the intended effect for the advertisement, the viewer may not watch the content until the end, or the viewer may have to watch uninteresting content.
On the other hand, from a viewpoint of information security, in operating an image forming apparatus, such as a printer or a multifunction peripheral (MFP), a user authentication function by IC card authentication or biometric authentication, such as fingerprint authentication, vein authentication, iris authentication, or the like, is becoming utilized more and more. By conducting the user authentication, loss of information, such as illegally viewing information written on printed matter by a third party, or stealing the printed matter, is prevented, and thus the user authentication contributes to the enhancement of the information security. Restricting the operation of the image forming apparatus by user authentication is, for example, after the user issues an instruction for printing from a personal computer (PC), the user moves to the image forming apparatus, and conducts user authentication to execute the printing. In the above example, wasted time occurs from the beginning of user authentication to the end of printing, when the user merely waits for the printing to finish.
Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2011-028437 discloses an image forming apparatus which displays data related to at least one of user information and image data to be printed on a display unit of the image forming apparatus during printing of the image data to be printed, in order to utilize the user's wait time effectively.
However, although the image forming apparatus described in the Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2011-028437, utilizes the user's wait time until the end of printing, a length of the display time of the display data (content) to be provided to the user is not taken into account. Accordingly, the provided content does not always correspond to both the content provider's needs and the user's needs, and thus the above problem is not solved. Furthermore, if the data to be displayed is related to the image data to be printed, which includes highly-confidential information, such as “for internal use only”, or the like, a third party may view the confidential information, and thus the image forming apparatus disclosed in the Japanese Published Patent Application 2011-028437 also poses a problem of information security.